Where can you learn leadership skills from the best of the best, network with great friends AND enjoy a day out at the ballpark? It's time to register for this year's ASNE-APME News Leadership Conference and all it has to offer.

Registration is $275 for members of ASNE and $375 for nonmembers. Lunch tickets are $40 each for

Tuesday and Wednesday, and a limited number of tickets are available for the Pittsburgh Pirates vs. Philadelphia Phillies baseball game at 7:05 p.m. Tuesday. Tickets can be purchased for $32 when you register for the conference.Deadline to make hotel reservations is Aug. 19. The block of rooms we reserved at the Marriott has a nightly rate of $199 for Sunday, Sept. 11, through Wednesday, Sept. 14.

· Keynotes by leading-edge thinkers and influences, including Marty Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, who will speak about the transformational changes he has led in the newsroom.

· Panels and workshops on practices and tools to improve coverage and engagement, including workshop by The City University of New York’s CUNY Graduate School of Journalism to teach editors how to develop community-driven news products.

APPM offer speakers from news organizations across the country, from those doing community photojournalism to photojournalists making documentary films. One of the speakers is Brian Cassella, a staff photographer at the Chicago Tribune, talking about his series "The Next Day," which documents the day following fatal shootings throughout Chicago.

Deadline extended for Community Journalism Public Service grants

Proposals due by 9 a.m. EDT Thursday, Aug. 11.

Smaller news organizations take note! Time is running out to apply for a grant that could fund your Big Idea!

Through the generous support of the Park and Associated Press Media Editors foundations, media companies in metropolitan areas (MSA) of 100,000 or fewer people can apply for one of two Community Journalism Public Service grants. Recipients each will receive $2,500 from the Park Foundation to jump-start or support their initiatives and a trip, courtesy of the APME Foundation, to the annual ASNE-APME conference in Philadelphia Sept. 11-14.

It's easy to enter: Draft a proposal of 500 words or less and include examples of how you would approach the project. It should be multiplatform, include social media and address a longstanding community issue.

For example, the 13,000-circulation Enid, Oklahoma, News & Eagle was the 2014 winner for its community initiative, "Under Pressure.” The project revealed the city wasn't providing services for its poorest neighborhoods. Previous winners were The Sedalia Democrat in Missouri for its "Meth at the Crossroads” series and the Beaver Dam News of Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, for its series on mental illness in its community.

The 2016 winners will be honored for their work at the joint ASNE/APME Conference, Sept. 11-14 in Philadelphia.

Celebrate the fifth anniversary of these grants by submitting your application today!

Join us at Middle Tennessee State University, 39 miles south of Nashville, for two full days of digital training in social, data, video and mobile by top journalists. Attendees regularly rate NewsTrain’s training as 4.5 or higher, with 5 as highly effective and useful.

Other upcoming deadlines include:

·Aug. 25 for diversity-scholarship applications for Murfreesboro NewsTrain. Journalists, journalism students and journalism educators from diverse backgrounds are invited to apply. Successful applicants will have their registration fee waived, courtesy of the APME Foundation.

·Sept. 1 for the $109 discounted room rate at a hotel offering a free shuttle to the Murfreesboro workshop site.

·Oct. 1 to apply to bring the learning, morale boost and fun of a NewsTrain to your town in 2017. Form a tentative committee of representatives from local journalism organizations and apply at bit.ly/HostNewsTrain.

Murfreesboro is NewsTrain’s last stop in 2016. Slides and handouts from recent NewsTrains can be accessed at slideshare.net/newstrain.